Thursday, 30 June 2016

I can
understand why the First Minister would come out demanding that Wales doesn’t
lose a penny in regional aid following Brexit, and that the UK Government
should commit to making up the difference.
It’s a natural response, given the sums involved and the number of
important projects which depend on this funding. But hold on a minute – didn’t we just,
effectively, vote against the whole principle of regional aid, even if wasn’t
put that way?

As one of the
EU’s richest member states, the UK contribution was higher than the amounts
received back in payments such as the budget rebate, farm subsidies and
regional aid. That ‘disparity’ was one
of the core arguments of the Brexit brigade.
No-one on the Remain side took the trouble, as far as I can recall, to
explain the reasons for that, let alone to defend it. But there are a number of reasons for the
disparity, and it’s worth stopping for a moment to consider what that ‘excess’
payment was spent on before assuming that it will automatically now be
available to spend.

For instance, some
of it went on those apparently hated ‘eurocrats’ – you know like the people
that manage the CAP, negotiate trade deals and other agreements, and manage the
single market. We won’t need them any more,
will we? Well, not exactly... Let’s take the case of trade
negotiators. For the next two years, we
will still be paying our share of the EU costs of employing such people, so
that they can negotiate with the UK as well as the rest of the world – and we
will also need to recruit and pay more of our own civil servants to negotiate
with them, whilst at the same time, negotiating our own deals with the rest of
the world. That latter cost won’t come
to an end in two years’ time either – we’ll need those skills for the
foreseeable future. Indeed, the cost of
doing this sort of thing for the UK alone is inevitably going to be higher than
it would be if the cost was shared between 28 states. Bang goes part of the ‘spare’ money. And that’s just one example.

But more
importantly, a lot of the EU budget is spent on attempting to redistribute wealth,
from the richer areas to the poorer. One
can argue (and I certainly would so argue) that this hasn’t always been spent
well or effectively, (although that’s generally more to do with those receiving
the largesse than with those dispensing it) but Wales is far from being the
only poor area of the EU, nor the only beneficiary of the EU’s attempts at redistribution.

Further, anyone
who was really serious about wanting to slow migration within the single market
would be arguing for more redistribution, not less. All the talk about people
moving from areas of low economic activity to areas of high activity has
focussed on the impact on the receiving countries, but if there is a part of
the UK which should realise more than any other area how badly such migration
impacts the areas from which people migrate, it is surely Wales. Isn’t that loss of young working people exactly
what we have been suffering from for decades?

But back to the
point – to argue that we should not contribute more than we get back (which is
what the leavers were doing) is in essence to argue against the very principle
of redistributive policy. It is to argue
against the richer helping out the poorer.

One doesn’t
need to take much of a look at some of the Brexiters to understand that arguing
that the rich should keep what they have and not share it is probably
instinctive and natural for them. So,
regardless of what they said during the campaign, why would anyone believe that
people who are against the whole concept of redistributing wealth are suddenly
going to be generously in favour of it within the UK? Worse, why do they even need to, when the
people of Wales themselves have voted to support that sort of economic
selfishness?